Jailed Chilean cult leader Schaefer dies
Source: ca.news.yahoo.com
Former Nazi Paul Schaefer, who founded a secretive German cult in Southern Chile in the 1960s and was later convicted of sexually abusing children, died of heart failure in a prison hospital on Saturday, officials said.Local media initially said he was 88 at the time of his death, but a death certificate released later by doctors listed his age as 89.
Chile’s courts began investigating Schaefer on sex abuse charges in 1997. He fled to Argentina where he hid until he was found in 2005. He was returned to Chile and sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing 25 children.
German citizen Paul Schaefer, a fugitive religious sect leader, is led under custody to be transferred from a police station to a prison located in the Buenos Aires province city of Mercedes, late March 10, 2005. REUTERS/STR
Courts also investigated Schaefer for keeping a huge cache of illegal weapons and helping former right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet’s secret police kidnap and torture political prisoners.
For decades, the residents of Villa Baviera, initially called Colonia Dignidad, submitted to the authoritarian whims of Schaefer, who banned almost all contact with the outside world at the commune 210 miles south of Santiago, the capital.
Under his rules, men and women lived separately, intimate contact was controlled and children were split from their parents.
In 2006, former members of the cult issued a public apology and asked for forgiveness for 40 years of sex and human rights abuses in their community, saying they were brainwashed by Schaefer, who many viewed as God.
Article from: ca.news.yahoo.com
Secrets of ex-Nazi’s Chilean fiefdom
By Becky Branford | BBCNews.co.uk
Paul Schaefer - a former Nazi medic, Baptist preacher and alleged cult leader - has finally been captured in Argentina after eight years on the run.His arrest means he may face trial on outstanding charges of the sexual abuse of young boys in Chile.
Mr Schaefer, who is in his 80s, has also been denounced by former followers and by human rights campaigners.
For them, his capture signals the end to decades of impunity for what they allege are his strange and terrible crimes.
Paul Schaefer was a medic in Hitler’s army during World War II. After the war, he set up an evangelical ministry and a youth home, purportedly to care for war orphans.
But he was charged with sexually abusing two boys - and in 1961 he fled to Chile, reportedly accompanied by some 70 followers.
There, in a lush valley in the Andean foothills, he set up Colonia Dignidad - now renamed Villa Baviera.
Small empire
The colony near the city of Parral, some 350km (220 miles) south of Santiago, grew to about 300 members - mostly German immigrants, or their descendants, but including some Chilean followers.
The 137-sq-km (53-sq-mile) Colonia Dignidad boasted a school, a hospital, two airstrips, a restaurant, and a power station, and reportedly made millions of dollars through a diversified range of businesses, including agriculture, mining and real estate.
It won over local people by offering jobs and free schooling and hospital care.
Details of life in the colony are hard to verify. Some visitors have described a scene from 1930s Germany, with women wearing aprons, with their hair in pigtails, and men in lederhosen.
Defenders say the members of the colony may be eccentric, but they are harmless, and in fact do good.
"I know them, and I like them," Otto Dorr Zegers, a prominent Chilean psychiatrist who has worked in the Colonia Dignidad hospital, told the New York Times.
"Their ideology is a little bit old-fashioned, like that of the Mennonites who went to the United States, but nothing justifies the co-ordinated, synchronised lies and distortions that have been invented about them."
But "defectors" from the camp paint a more sinister picture. His accusers say Colonia Dignidad was Mr Schaefer’s fiefdom, where he was worshipped as a god.
They say residents, who are never allowed beyond the gates of the camp, are kept strictly segregated into genders - so much so that the birth rate of the camp is extremely low.
Residents are taught to shun sexual desires - with electric shocks administered to the genitals of young boys, former residents say.
And they accuse Mr Schaefer of the almost daily sexual abuse of young boys. Horror stories have emerged of the young sons of poor local families "disappearing" within the barriers of the compound.
Torture house
But Mr Schaefer’s story is not confined to the perimeter fence of the colony - topped with barbed wire, studded with searchlights, and overlooked by a watchtower.
It goes right to the heart of the Chilean state during the iron rule of Gen Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s - a period with which Chileans are still struggling to come to terms today.
Right: Dissidents say they were tortured in bunkers at Colonia Dignidad.The son of Manuel Contreras - the head of Dina, Chile’s now-disbanded notorious secret police - has told the Los Angeles Times his father first visited Colonia Dignidad with Gen Pinochet in 1974.
He has spoken of the warm relationship that grew between his father and Mr Schaefer.
Former political prisoners of Gen Pinochet have testified to a warren of stone-walled tunnels under the colony, where they were taken to be tortured with electric shocks to the strains of Wagner and Mozart.
The Truth and Justice Commission, which investigated human rights abuses during Gen Pinochet’s rule, backs such allegations.
And despite decades of allegations concerning the sexual abuse of boys within the compound, charges were not filed against Schaefer until 1996 - six years after Chile began its return to democracy.
Thanks to Mr Schaefer’s close links with Chile’s ruling elite, the colony was able to operate with impunity as a "state within a state", said a Chilean congressional report.
Critics say elements within Chile’s ruling establishment would still prefer to keep details of his involvement with Gen Pinochet’s government concealed.
They say Chile must confront such allegations if it is to complete the process of coming to terms with its past.
Article from: BBCNews.co.uk
